The Resilient World

Clipped from Seed Magazine, this interview with Kary Mullis about a new kind of drug with the potential to cure infectious diseases. A 100% cure rate for mice infected with anthrax is discussed. If it pans out, this is a game changer in so many ways. It could boost productivity and life expectancy tremendously in Africa, for one thing, which potentially could lead to smaller more resilient families.

This is a tremendously good thing.

That doesn't mean that Sevareid's Law doesn't apply (every problem begins as a solution). There will be consequences. For one, I would expect that the Pareto principle applies here - 80% of the effects from 20% of the causes - meaning tremendous effort will be required to reach the most unreachable 20%, with the usual implications for fairness. It's analogous to the "last mile" problem in communications. Another thing to consider could be the gradual loss of resistance to disease, meaning that control of such drugs could become a means of exercising power and social control. (These by the way are good reasons why public financing of such a breakthrough is a good idea). As usual, when you win at one level in this great video game of life you're kicked up to a faster harder tougher level. But let's not wish for bad luck - this is great news. Let's use it wisely.

Amplify’d from seedmagazine.com

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis offers a radical new way to treat infectious diseases as the effectiveness of our current antibiotics wanes.

Kary Mullis, a self-proclaimed non-specialist, won the Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that allows researchers to quickly and cheaply make many copies of single strands of DNA. For the past decade Mullis has been using PCR to create new types of drugs that could soon provide a cure for everything from malaria to anthrax. He tells Seed how he is bridging the gap between disparate scientific fields to devise a radical new way to combat infectious diseases.

Seed: Why do we need to rethink the way we treat infectious diseases?

Kary Mullis: Many pathogens are becoming resistant to our antibiotics. Consider penicillin, for example. We took it from a fungus that grew in the soil and killed bacteria for food. Because of this warfare, some bacteria had developed a resistance via DNA, to penicillin. Over time, they passed this resistance via DNA up to the pathogens that infect our bodies. So now many organisms—like Staphylococcus aureu, the cause of Staph infections—are, in large part, unaffected by penicillin. In this way a lot of bacteria have mutated around our antibiotics.

The standard pharmaceutical response is to go stomping through the jungle trying to find extracts of all the organisms and see if one of them will inhibit the growth of particular bacteria. And that of course will get more and more difficult as time goes on. It is clear that we need another solution.

My work with PCR allowed for the invention by Craig Tuerk of nucleic aptamers, which are tiny binding molecules that can be designed to attach themselves to harmful bacteria. However, instead of attaching a poison to the other end of the aptamer—as the silver-bullet strategy would call for—I put something on there that is a target for our immune system, a chemical compound with which the immune system is already familiar and to which it is very strongly immune. What you end up with is a drug that will drag this thing to which you are highly immune over to some bacteria you don’t want in your body. And your immune system will attack and kill it.

What we should be asking about a brand new idea is, “Does it have a chance of ever working?” And if the answer is “yes,” we should consider supporting it. We don’t need to give it a million dollars, just enough money to prove itself. Because today, by the time you get most science prizes, you already have 200 people working on an idea. That’s not when the idea is delicate.

Seed: You have said that you are not a specialist. The non-specialist is an increasingly rare breed in science. What do you understand your role to be in today’s highly specialized scientific research community?

KM: I am undisciplined—a loose cannon on deck is one way to talk about me. The positive spin you can put on it is that I can say to one specialist, “You have got some knowledge that, put together with this guy who is an organic chemist and with this guy who knows about influenza in chickens, can accomplish something that none of us could do on our own.” That sounds corny, but it takes years to make those kinds of connections—and doing so requires people wide open with their interests. Read more at seedmagazine.com